Kernel: Maple Tree, Xen, and Linux at 30

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Maple Tree v2 Patches For The Linux Kernel - 13~840% Faster For Malloc Threads Test Case - Phoronix
Sent out last year was a "request for comments" on "Maple Tree" as a new data structure for the Linux kernel. The latest version of the Maple Tree patches were sent out today with mixed results but for where gains are being made they can be quite significant.
The Maple Tree is a data structure for storing index ranges that map to a single pointer and work well on modern CPUs (modern CPU caches) in an RCU-safe manner. Post-RFC, earlier this year Oracle sent out their Maple Tree patches with promising results and have now been succeeded by the "v2" patches.
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Xen Developer and Design Summit: A Year of Fuzzing with Xen - Xen Project
At the 2021 Xen Developer and Design Summit, Tamas K Lengyel, Senior Security Researcher at Intel Corporation, gave a deep dive into the latest developments of Intel’s Xen-based fuzzer that the organization open-sourced last year. A fuzzer is a program that helps detect bugs in code.
Since open-sourcing, Tamas and his team have gained operational experience while fuzzing a variety of kernel modules in Linux. In this talk, he showcases the workflow that led to the discovery of several security issues in the Linux kernel, such as NULL-pointer dereferences, array-index out-of-bounds, and infinite loops in interrupt-context. All the issues were triggerable by an external device via DMA but thanks to the fuzzing effort, are now fixed upstream. This talk covers how Xen can be used to fuzz Windows VMs and even Xen itself!
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30 Years of Linux History Told via Distros [Ed: GNU is 38; it's unfair to pretend distros are just a kernel]
Happy Birthday, Linux. At 30 years old, you have made quite a reputation for yourself. Having spirited the rise of open-source software, you have turned the world of proprietary computing upside down.
Of course, you had a bit of a premature start. You entered the world of technology with little more than a kernel to call your own. That was the intent of a young computer science student from Helsinki named Linus Torvalds in doing this personal fun project. In 1991, he created your code that would become the basis for a completely new approach to operating systems for computers.
The rest of that story, as they say, is history.
You suffered a name change at first. You started out being called Freax, as in "free," "freak," and "x" (referencing the Unix computer OS). But eventually, your creator came around to sharing his own lineage with you, christening you Linux.
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today's howtos
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